Trans Politics, Trans Activism, also 'rolling is this transphobic?' thread

Thanks for sharing the link unperson! I'm really glad I was able to read it. There are lots of media narratives about trans people, not always positive, and paywalls frustrate me because here are all these cis people saying all this shit about us and I have no idea what it is because I don't subscribe to their newsletter.

This is good to read because it is a trans person telling her own story, and I'm in favor of that. It's also more complicated... she's being interviewed by David Marchese, a celebrity interviewer who is, to the best of my knowledge, a cis man. Also, as the end of the article notes, "This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations."... and it's in the New York Times. My experience is that the NYT's editorial policy towards trans issues favors showing "both sides" of the "trans debate". This is in contrast to the editorial policy of the Washington Post, which from what I've read is pretty unambiguously on the side of "trans rights are human rights".

It's good for me personally to read because Izzard (who I thought was going by Suzy last I heard? But I'm not always up to date on these things) was very much a role model for me... she helped me to understand myself and accept my transness. I do want to talk about how, though, because the way Izzard describes her life in this story is very different from the way I understood Izzard when I was growing up. It's complicated and very much gets into the whole "gender as social construct" thing.

Izzard talks about having known she was trans since 5 and having come out and the article talks of her having coming out publicly as transgender in '85, but that's not how I understood it. There's a little.... I'm gonna blame the Times on this, actually. This is bad and biased framing. Now, admittedly I'm making an assumption here, but I find it _extremely unlikely_ that Izzard got up on a stage in 1985 and said "I'm transgender". No, what I heard her saying in specials like "Dressed to Kill" is that she was an "action transvestite". Which isn't the same thing as being transgender! Transvestites _can_ be transgender, or trans, or anything else. That's wasn't the understanding in '85. The word "transgender" technically existed by '85, I think, but the concept of being "transgender" as we understand it today did _not_.

It's important for me to say this because of my experience the first time I tried to come out, in 1996. I wasn't able to understand myself, much less explain myself. All I could say was what I was not. I wasn't a "transvestite" because I wasn't a man who dressed in women's clothes. I wasn't a "transsexual" because I didn't want to get my dick cut off. (Other people might frame GRS different ways. That's the way I framed GRS at the time.) I was... well, I didn't know what I was. I just kind of felt like a girl?

The way Izzard influenced me was that she challenged the framing I grew up with. Not in the '90s, but later. For a long time I thought of "transvestites" and "transsexuals" as being distinct categories with nothing to do with each other. So when I found out that Izzard, who I thought of as a "transvestite", a cisgender, heterosexual man who just liked dressing in women's clothes, actually identified as _transgender_, it was really liberating. It helped me to understand that these weren't rigid categories that defined who we were, who we were allowed to be. That wasn't until around 2019, though. It was one of the many things that helped me understand myself as trans.

The thing that is most disappointing to me is to hear that Izzard is an open defender of J.K. Rowling's statements about trans people. Izzard's statement that "I don't think J.K. Rowling is transphobic"... I don't take that as the opinion of a trans person who I happen to differ with. Her statement is an untruth. It saddens me to hear trans people who are speaking from a position of relative privilege making false statements of this sort. Rowling isn't just a transphobe. Her transphobia is causing a great deal of harm to trans people. So this I think is one of those instances where a trans person is aligning herself with transphobia. I'm always saddened to see that happen, but it's particularly painful when it's someone who has been a role model for me, who did help me to understand myself as trans.

So yesterday I happened across a reference to a Mythbusters spinoff called the "White Rabbit Project" from 2016. Turns out one of the things they talked about was a supposed plan by British intelligence to, well, trans Hitler. Yeah, apparently somebody at some point had the idea of putting E in his food and, I guess, force femming him? This is one of those things that gets described as "unbelievable but true", and for me, the jury's out on the "true" part... the only source seems to be a guy named Brian Ford, who wrote a pop history book on "World War II Secret Weapons", and doesn't provide a source for his claim. So, grain of salt on that one.

What I was more interested in is how this 2016 show would approach the legend. It's fascinating to me because nobody on the show (which was presented by the old Mythbusters build team) seemed to have any concept of the possible relevance of this to trans people. They talked about the possible effects of it and they said things like "well it could cause nausea" which is... not really a major side effect of estrogen. Nobody mentioned gender dysphoria. It was all "he'd get boobs and his weenie would stop working". It was never stated outright that the gendered assumptions underlying this idea were bullshit, but yeah, look, Hitler probably didn't start World War II because of gender dysphoria. Sounds like an absolute waste of estrogen. There were so many people in Britain who really could have used that estrogen, but noooo, _they_ can't have estrogen, only Hitler gets estrogen. Fuck you Britain.

But also like. The world has changed so much in the last EIGHT YEARS. It's fucking wild.

I have kind of come back a lot to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" over the, I don't know, year or less since I've become aware of it. It's this... I guess the best I could call it "ambiguously trans". I like the ambiguity in these stories, their resistance to providing clear, straightforward trans narratives. That's probably why the least interesting character in "Bokura no Hentai" for me was the girl who's just a straightforward trans girl. The character I connected more with was Parou, the more "otokonoko" character, even though I was never anything close to or resembling the "otokonoko" trope myself.

Anyway, this video on "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" I thought was really good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illSp1oVXzA

First off I kind of love the weird way it's structured, to where it just takes ten minutes in the middle to have someone review some of Hibari's outfits. That's so much of what makes the show for me, she has just really amazing outfits... Hibari just has just a vibrant _style_. A lot of trans wish fulfillment is just thinking about all the cute outfits that would be possible. That gets put down a lot and treated as superficial... like, it's not specific to transness... under patriarchy to be concerned with fashion whatsoever is kind of dismissed as sort of vain and image-obsessed. The sad truth is, as much as I was actively hostile towards my own appearance pre-transition, I didn't really stand out. I'm there wearing ten year old pants that just look like clown pants because I'd lost fifty pounds since I bought them, and I see plenty of cis guys out there who are just that slovenly. It's not remarkable. Male privilege is kind of a double-edged sword... as a passing trans woman in her late 40s, a lot of my passing privilege is that I have the option of not being perceived in the same sense that cis women in their 40s aren't perceived, aren't seen as _suitable objects of desire_. Which sucks because being desired is kind of personally important to me. I don't want to not be perceived - invisibility for me is about as hazardous to my health as silence - but I do at least have the option of looking _unremarkable_.

The main thing, though, that I connected with is how Pyramid Inu talks about... the cost of doing this representation that aligns so closely with present-day trans experience, of depicting with startling accuracy both how trans women _behave_ and the way trans women are for a lot of us aspirational figures, the cost of that is that the show can't ever reach narrative closure, not in that era. Kousaku can't wind up with Hibari... it's not a product of a world that can see a cis guy and a trans girl get a "happy ever after" kind of ending. It's, like, literally unimaginable. That's a lot of what transness was for me, growing up... literally unimaginable. I think that's what strikes me about these sort of amgibuously trans figures from this era... they're sort of visions of a way that transness could exist in a time where I just _couldn't_ exist as trans. It makes me feel less, I don't know, invisible. Maybe.

BTW it's a fucking tragedy that there was never a manga or anime of Guldeen: The Future Wanderer. Trans mecha directly inspired by "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!"? Oh my God that this doesn't exist is proof positive that we live in the worst timeline.

I don't think, honestly, it would be possible to remake or do a sequel to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!" today. A lot of it is dependent on the culutural role of gender non-conformity. Because today somebody who presents and acts like Hibari does in that show and you can just say oh, wait, that's a trans woman... and as soon as you do that you have to kind of deal with the reality of what it's like being trans in 2024. One of the things that really clicks with me about "Hibari" is that it's a work that _feels_ authentically trans but is at the same time escapist fantasy. Trans escapist fantasy just isn't something that's narratively _accessible_ in 2024. It's unimaginable to me in the same way that Hibari and Kousaku winding up together was unimaginable in 1983. At the same time, it's something I really desperately need, something I'll take wherever I can find it. I think that's a lot of what draws me to "Stop!! Hibari-Kun!".

ok i know we probably have another trans thread but youtube keeps recommending me more and more niche trans-related weeb videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca5B1DxdkZw

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/01/trans-people-england-more-likely-mental-health-condition-study

i wonder why, the guardian

important to note that a majority still don't appear to have long-term mental health conditions. the stigma that trans people are just fucked-up headcases must be overcome too. these results back up the notion that under conditions where they're not treated like scum by the majority of the commentariat they'd have similar mental health patterns to the population as a whole

those seem like low rates of depression & anxiety for trans people if anything given how the uk is

No, what I heard her saying in specials like "Dressed to Kill" is that she was an "action transvestite". Which isn't the same thing as being transgender! Transvestites _can_ be transgender, or trans, or anything else. That's wasn't the understanding in '85. The word "transgender" technically existed by '85, I think, but the concept of being "transgender" as we understand it today did _not_.

You're correct - she made a big point of saying she was a tranvestite and not a transexual in his early shows! I used to know almost all of Dressed to Kill and being an executive transvestite was a huge part of it. She is going by Suzy but I also read that she doesn't mind Eddie or other pronouns since she knows that how most people have known her for decades.

*her* early shows obv whoops

those seem like low rates of depression & anxiety for trans people if anything given how the uk is

― ufo

i think that if i were in the uk i would feel a lot more pressure to... act like i wasn't mentally ill, to mask (i don't think of my autism or ADHD as "mental illnesses", i'm just borrowing the framing here). because like imago says "the stigma that trans people are just fucked-up headcases must be overcome too."

my being trans is strongly correlated with my being a fucked up headcase! for the first 40 or so years of my life i believed, because i was _taught_, that my wanting to be a woman meant there was something deeply, deeply wrong with me, that i was probably secretly a serial killer or something, and that i could never ever tell anybody about it. that shit didn't just _go away_ the second i started taking estrogen. it wasn't just like "oh i'm a girl everything's fine now and i have no problems".

and yeah UK media outlets like the guardian centering the trans "debate", the idea that it's legitimate to question the validity of my existence as a human being, that kind of thing does have a tendency to undermine a person's sense of self-worth. one of the things i struggle with is this constant pressure to be one of "the good ones". i'm not one of the "good ones" because there are no "good ones". like oh sure, being trans is fine as long as you're not also mentally ill or communist or polyamorous or kinky or, you know, _queer_ in any meaningful way. in a lot of ways that's what "passing privilege" boils down to, i have the ability to look like i'm _not obviously queer_ in certain contexts.

living in the us, in a trans-supportive environment, i have kind of a different challenge, which is communicating to people that i'm a fucked up headcase _because_ of systemic transphobia, when the assumption has historically been that the whole "trans" thing is in itself the mental illness. like i think there _is_ causation in a lot of cases, it's just the exact opposite of the direction a lot of people assume it is.

*her* early shows obv whoops

― Benson and the Jets (ENBB)

well that's the thing, it's hard to say even if it _is_ a whoops because she's "ok with any pronouns". it's one of those things where it's hard to know what that means. like in her case "preferred pronouns" are genuinely that? "preferred pronouns"? and suzy is her "preferred name". so it's ok, i guess, that the NYT does a whole profile on her and consistently calls her "eddie" even though her preferred name is suzy?

that's the thing that makes it difficult, again, all of the _pressure_ we're under. saying "oh i'm ok with any pronouns" is a great way to take some of the sting out of being misgendered. if people are gonna call you by a man's name and use male pronouns for you no matter what, you know? it's something i also saw in with, like, rachel humphreys, lou reed's partner for much of the 70s. will hermes, you know, he does his best navigating the shifting landscape of gender identities, and one of the things he points out in his prologue (which is all of his lou reed book i've actually read so far lol) that humphreys was ok with "any pronouns", and i mean, if you look at the shit people _said_ about her back then... it's not like she was in a position to say "no, i am a woman and you are going to respect that." i have the ability to be able to say that, _now_. i didn't in 1996, which is one of the big reasons i didn't transition back then.

i think you kind of see that in a lot of people who have been out as some variety of gender non-conforming for quite a long time. the stuff trans people go through now, it's often invisible to cis people and is really hard to talk about. i think there's a pretty strong likelihood that suzy has spent her whole life being called the f-slur. when people are transphobic, usually they don't call us the t-slur, they call us the f-slur. i mean, how do you deal with something like that? for a while i did the "i'm not an f-slur, i'm a dyke" thing, and now i'm like "sure, ok, i'm an f-slur, is that a problem?" (i'm "reclaiming" it but not to the extent that i'll say the actual word in ways that will make people uncomfortable!)

which is to say that while i'm horrified at suzy saying that she doesn't think j.k. rowling is transphobic, i absolutely understand where that impulse is coming from. i don't blame her for it. it is, though, especially horrifying to me, seeing a trans person caping for jkr. to me, that's a special case, that's when someone externalizes internalized transphobia. that's some of what gets contrapoints criticized from certain people within the trans community - there's specific stuff that's not wider public knowledge that makes that explicit, but again, when you look at where she came from, which is 4chan... you come up through there and you're gonna get a fuckton of internalized transphobia, you're really gonna learn to hate yourself in a way that a lot of trans people don't. and a lot of times it's people who in one way or another externalize internalized transphobia, the blaire whites, the caitlyn jenners, who are held up by cis media and cis culture as being _representative_ of us. but there are more complicated cases! richard o'brien is a positive role model for a lot of trans and gender non-conforming people, is non-binary, and they're also transphobic. contrapoints' videos, overall they've been very positive for trans people. her work has done a huge amount to promote trans acceptance. that's way more important than the occasional undercurrents of internalized transphobia in her work. those occasional undercurrents don't invalidate the tremendous things she's done to further the cause of trans rights. it's just _there_, occasionally, and sometimes it comes out in ways that hurt some of us.

like i said, suzy izzard was really influential on me, had a positive influence on me in a lot of ways. she just doesn't speak for trans people (any more than i speak for trans people) and some of the things she says are actively harmful to a lot of trans people.

I have tended to ignore her based on my hatred of british comedy and my assumption that her thing was just part of the long UK tradition of drag-as-comedy* (as distinct- in my mind at least- from drag-as-drag which may be comedic or not) which I now see was a reductive POV and that element was just a means of hiding in plain sight

*see US transphobes periodically trying and largely failing to rile up UK transphobes over the (to my mind) deeply conservative tradition of the pantomime dame (maybe worth reconsidering my perspective on this since I know nothing about this part of the culture)

the JKR thing is a very bad take but it's worth remembering how cis celebrities who have called her out have been treated in this country - in this case it would mean weeks of headlines and probably serious career consequences

those mental health stats are BS

personally I don't know of any trans or queer people who aren't headcases but I don't trust anyone who isn't a headcase in this world

No way was Izzard ever drag-as-comedy tbf.

I know that now but I made that assumption based on what people around me were saying

I have tended to ignore her based on my hatred of british comedy and my assumption that her thing was just part of the long UK tradition of drag-as-comedy* (as distinct- in my mind at least- from drag-as-drag which may be comedic or not) which I now see was a reductive POV and that element was just a means of hiding in plain sight

*see US transphobes periodically trying and largely failing to rile up UK transphobes over the (to my mind) deeply conservative tradition of the pantomime dame (maybe worth reconsidering my perspective on this since I know nothing about this part of the culture)

i mean i do think the whole tradition is interesting, there is a part of the gender non-conforming experience that is deeply conservative - i mean, just look at how many trans women come through 4chan. i do wonder, speculatively, if there is perhaps some correlation to how passing-centered one is and conservatism. a lot of times "passing" comes hand in hand with, you know, tradwifing. that's one of the reasons i was so, i'll say, ambivalent to the notion of "passing" early in transition. i didn't want to tradwife.

what i remember of izzard's stuff is that it was very "yes, i'm a transvestite, but when you think of what a "transvestite" is in your head, that's _not_ who i am". part of it is "hiding in plain sight" but part of it is that, i mean, the thing about being a "pioneer" is that a lot of the time one just has no fucking idea what one is doing. literally as far as most of us know we're just making this shit up for the first time. so izzard is out there in what we might call today "genderfuck". i mean even the fact that she's coming out there as a transvestite and _not wearing a skirt_ is kind of a mindfuck to me at the time but the genderfuck goes way beyond that.

but at the same time there's a lot of "look i'm also a basically normal person". that's still a difficult thing to me, i'm _not_ basically a normal person? but most of the shit i do is normal shit. and even when i do stuff that other people would think of as "weird", people make way too big a deal out of it. i don't want people to think of me as being "a normal person just like anyone else", but i also don't see why people would find it "weird" if i decide to go out in public wearing booty shorts and thigh-high striped socks (which i tend not to do, mostly because i'm not always up to being stared at). it's like, look, i just felt like dressing that way today! that's kind of the sense i get from izzard, she's up there on stage in tight leather pants and high-heeled boots and makeup and is like "yeah i like dressing like this, why is that a big deal".

that said i didn't, in the 90s, recognize her gender stuff as being in any way along the same spectrum as my gender stuff. a lot of it was that at the time i was interested in the more traditionally femme aspects of womanhood. looking at it now, it makes sense, like at that point she'd been publicly gender non-conforming for, i guess, a decade, and one's sense of style sort of tends to evolve over that period of time. a lot of it, i think, genuinely is a lack of lived experience. patriarchy sucks, being a woman sucks a lot of the time... at the same time, there are, like, 40 years of female gendered experiences that i've missed out on. transition isn't as simple as pushing The Button and going from a 43-year-old "man" to a 43-year-old woman. i've gotten a crash course in a lot things, good and bad.

there were all these ideas that just... wasn't any overarching conceptual understanding of them. i had a friend back in the '90s, when i was first trying to come out, who said they didn't have a gender. nowadays, that's easy for me to get, oh sure they're agender, cool, at the time, though? at the time i'm like that meme of columbo reading "gender trouble". "gender huh? see my wife got a cousin lew and she tells me lew don't have one. you ever hearda somethin' like that?" so izzard comes out and says "action transvestite" or "executive transvestite" and i come out and say "i don't know, i'm not really a transvestite and i'm not really a transsexual, i just, kind of, want to do girl shit sometimes", and it turns out those two things probably have a lot to do with each other... it wasn't something that was easy to recognize at the time.

-

when it comes to the larger notion of drag i do tend to... and this is a false binary, like a lot of binaries... differentiate between monty python-style pepperpot drag humor where it's like "ha ha, don't i look ridiculous and stupid, men wearing dresses are disgusting" and the sort of drag humor where the person has obviously put a lot of effort into it and knows how to look good. one of the things i think about with regards to "humor" is this 14th century rabbi by the name of kalonymus ben kalonymus, his big work was something called "eben bohan", which... i haven't read the whole thing, but apparently it's kind of a mix of serious pieces and more comedy bits. and there's this bit in there which is him lamenting over not having been born a woman. some critics have read this and said oh, yeah, this is one of his comedy pieces, god, that's hilarious, who would want to be a _woman_? a lot of trans people, on the other hand, particularly transfemmes, we read this and it's just like "oh my god, he fucking gets it, this is what gender dysphoria _feels_ like." and maybe it was just, you know, "satire" like people in the past have said it is, that its deep expression of gender dysphoria is just, i don't know, us reading into something that isn't there. who knows? the author has been dead for something like 700 years now. even if it is "satire" i find a lot of value and solace in being able to see someone writing 700 years ago writing something that resonates so deeply with me, with my experience of gender dysphoria.

it's not fucking "lola", is what i'm saying.

the JKR thing is a very bad take but it's worth remembering how cis celebrities who have called her out have been treated in this country - in this case it would mean weeks of headlines and probably serious career consequences

i mean she could always just have not said anything. she didn't have to call her out _or_ defend her.

personally I don't know of any trans or queer people who aren't headcases but I don't trust anyone who isn't a headcase in this world

― Left

i'll be honest my sample is skewed, there are some really good, legitimate reasons for people who are emotionally and mentally well-adjusted to, like, not actively seek out my company, haha

and also yeah the mental health people i engage with, there's a pretty common, if unspoken, understanding that a lot of "mental health" issues are caused by systemic oppression beyond our individual control. like yeah i feel like shit because people treat me like shit. that's not exactly a failure on my part, but i still gotta deal with the consequences of that.

I know that now but I made that assumption based on what people around me were saying

― Left

plus wanting to avoid media depictions of gender non-conformity that one suspects might be pretty hostile is... i mean, it's an evaluation one has to make. if i'm going to go see "the crying game" looking for an honest and sensitive portrayal of the trans experience i'm going to have a real bad time.

the news from yesterday - Cheshire Police didn't pursue Brianna Ghey's murder as a hate crime despite it being so very obviously so, and the sentencing judge made it perfectly clear in her sentencing remarks that she agreed.

ok lol anybody remember Val Venis
the 1990s wrestler with the pornstar gimmick
he's apparently now a libertarian and has decided trans people shouldn't exist. so someone bought up the domain valvenis.com and redirected it to a trans rights website, which is extra hilarious because it highlights how nobody is even slightly interested in val venis and certainly is not going to go to this guy's website
i bet gorgeous george would've said "trans rights"

Val venis
Has a small weenis

in less entertaining news tumblr's ceo's recent actions have led to a mass exodus of trans users (to cohost, i guess?):

https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/22/tumblr-ceo-publicly-spars-with-trans-user-over-account-ban-revealing-private-account-names-in-the-process/

silberling's article notes:

Tumblr is in an extended downward spiral. Tumblr was acquired by Yahoo (now TechCrunch’s parent company) for $1 billion in 2013, but the platform struggled to the point that Automattic bought Tumblr for just $3 million in 2019. Last year, Mullenweg said that the platform loses $30 million each year, and later, he reassigned the majority of Tumblr’s staff to other projects inside of Automattic. But no one on the trust and safety team was reassigned, so these moderation decisions likely weren’t impacted by the company shake-up. However, Tumblr has a bad track record for content moderation decisions, especially those involving trans people.

ok this shit is fucking wild

https://metalinjection.net/news/breakups/hardcore-band-fires-their-vocalist-for-the-most-insane-unhinged-behavior

lead singer dosed one of the other band members, sixx, with estrogen long-term so he could steal that band member's girlfriend

it, uh. didn't work. for the record.

Meanwhile, this shit isn't just in red states.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nassau-county-banning-transgender-athletes-from-competing-at-its-facilities/

xpost Sounds like the plot of the next Daily Wire movie

xpost Sounds like the plot of the next Daily Wire movie

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

doesn't reflect poorly enough on trans people, for the daily wire to make it a movie they'd have to make the diego character trans

god i'm giving them ideas now aren't i

Meanwhile, this shit isn't just in red states.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra)

oh yeah, institutional transphobia has been on the rise for a while now, and it's spreading

one of the reasons focusing on the positive is so important for me is because it's... not as _visible_ as the negative

i don't know anywhere in the world _less_ transphobic in pdx, but even here, it's very much on the rise. there's more hostility. every day it's something else. cishets mostly don't know about it. it's hard even for us queer people to know about it, because a lot of the reporting on it is paywalled. yesterday, for instance, the wall street journal published an article titled "Can Warner Bros. Uncancel J.K. Rowling?" i don't have access to the article, but yasharali writes about it:

https://www.threads.net/@yasharali/post/C3ys75XxGt5/

"David Zaslav, the CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery has mounted a full-court press to woo Rowling back into the fold which includes regularly speaking to her and flying out to London to have dinner with her"

and, i mean, i'm not really in the know about media companies, but the context i've heard is that well of course zaslav is, zaslav is a scumbag, a mercenary, interested in nothing more than artificially inflating the value of WB before dumping it on someone else

which may be true, but god, name me someone in charge of a major media property who _isn't_ a mercenary scumbag?

More about that here
https://www.therowlinglibrary.com/2024/02/24/exploring-the-relationship-between-warner-bros-and-j-k-rowling-three-key-points-revealed-by-the-wall-street-journal/

depressing but not surprising. honestly, most people don't have any idea that rowling is a transphobe. it's easy to look at that and conclude that there's no negative impact to supporting transphobes. obviously i'm hardly unbiased on this issue but i do think that conclusion is based on a misread of the data. while the current hostility towards trans people _is_ dissuading at least some people from transitioning or leading to them to detransition, at the same time, large numbers of people are continuing to pursue transition, even given a fairly hostile and repressive environment.

it's the small stuff, the everyday stuff, the little kindnesses. there's the headlines and then there's the viral tiktok about the guy and his child in smalltown texas who saw a trans woman for the first time and was overwhelmed with, like, happiness. joy is a social contagion. i keep saying that because i keep _seeing_ it.

i don't pay much attention when trans people get killed, only for my own well-being, not because it's not important. i know someone did, recently, and people are being hateful, and maybe it'll keep going like that. more violence. more killing. more blaming _us_. maybe nobody will connect that back to rowling. maybe it won't affect warner bros.' bottom line. ever. they'll keep raking in the bucks and turning a blind eye to the little "side projects" their business associates have and it'll just be some insignicant minority on social media talking about "cancelling" them.

well, i'm biased. i can't imagine i'd take that bet.

idk. i got called for jury duty today and i was surprised by how many just... ordinary-looking people there were. i'm not saying that as a put-down. it's just not something i see a lot of. i know that "ordinary-looking" isn't the same as "ordinary". i don't think of anybody as being actually "ordinary". there was one lady in front of me with pink hair on one side and black hair on another and stompy boots and a pentagram badge on her bag. behind me was a goth girl, the sort who dress goth even when it's cold and they're reporting for jury duty. and then there's me, looking as ordinary as anyone else, just with a trans flag-colored horizontally striped top from target's pride collection (i'm pretty sure the gay agenda has reclaimed _all_ horizontal stripes, at this point. all horizontal stripes are gay, just like rainbows are gay, just like love is gay). me and a couple hundred people in queueing for half an hour and then being told they can go home. is anybody else there seeing their first trans person? it sounds ridiculous, for god's sake, i live in _portland_, there are _thousands_ of us. even here, though. it's easy to not notice. maybe out of those hundreds of people, someone there saw me and was happy i existed, like that guy in small-town texas. joy is a social contagion, but it's not yet a pandemic. that doesn't bother me. i haven't gotten the impression that bigots are good at controlling pandemics.

Not sure where to put this but a week or so ago I saw a listing for a club night which described itself as "LGBTQIA+ and Hetero friendly" next to the address and hours info

lol

Let me tell you a short story how I “met” @HJoyceGender and two other leaders of @SexMattersOrg in the train to Cambridge last night. I didn’t know who they were at the time but I was sitting near a middle aged lady who was typing in very big letters on her phone. So I look.. 1/

— Letters Bunchofnumbers (@dschw89) February 27, 2024

tldr; Helen Joyce caught reading Harry Potter slashfic on a train

It’s not slash. Slash is male/male. It’s extremely funny that she reads in font huge enough that it can be clearly seen by someone sitting across from her. Also, JKR quite famously hates fic of her characters. Very funny thing to happen to this awful person.

oh nooooooooooooooo are we gatekeeping slash now :(

i'm actually reading a book by an old-school usenet veteran about "yuri" and the history of it, all the battles over it and who the audience is - is "yuri" an offensive term, should it be called "shoujo-ai" ("girls love"), stuff like that

with the added layer that these arguments are mostly taking place in the anglosphere about framings of gender and sexuality from another culture

but with the _added_ added layer that these framings were in themselves borrowed from english language framings

like for instance early on the term "rezu" started to being used, but a lot of its use was kind of similar to the way the word "lezzie" used to be used - stuff sort of based on cishet ideas of "lesbianism"

which then led to Actual Lesbians(tm) adopting the term "bian" to describe themselves

and all i can think of is "With our forces combined..."

ANYWAY to follow up i have now seen the tweet where the twitter CEO outed the trans user's alternate accounts, and i won't be sharing the account names because it was a privacy violation, but the alternate account names are fucking _hilarious_ and i am here for all of them. also hilarious that this guy thought by sharing the account names he would, like, shame the user. real "charlton heston reading the lyrics to cop killer" vibes.

No no, last week it was the twitter CEO, this week it's the tumblr CEO..

when does twumblr get involved

wtf

https://x.com/bowwowgoodboy/status/1774917359590916149?s=20

So I did watch the new Lily Alexandre video and it's as always a good watch, a difficult one, but I thought the peroration was particularly good at... succintly expressing things I see around me, things that I feel a lot and don't know how to express.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CxiPdXuwgc

"With such a wide range of people committed to giving trans people a hard time, it can sometimes feel like the whole planet is conspiring against us. Nearly all the trans people I know are barely scraping by, struggling in ways they've done nothing to deserve, while the people working to intensify our struggling face no such stigma. A lot of people I know are withdrawing. A lot of them are coping in ways that worry me."

There's more to it than that. Lily's not saying that to be a doomer. I'm not a doomer either. The stuff she says after that is important. It's stuff I know, stuff I've known for a while, and it's important to be reminded of that, and since she says it, it's important for me to remind other people of that, in my own words this time.

The planet is not conspiring against us. I'm a longtime conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn't say that there's a conspiracy _against_ trans people at all. It's not really _about_ us at all. The kinds of shit people are saying about us, they could be saying it about anyone. The Jews or the Palestinians or Black people or, you know, anyone. We're not the first. I don't think we'll be the last, though I'd fucking love to be wrong about that. It's comforting in a way, knowing that it's not just us, knowing that trans people aren't alone in this, but it's also frustrating. Alexandre quotes Bari Weiss, who's Jewish, parroting flat out anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, just with the word "trans" substituted in for "Jewish".

And it's not... I mean, someone like Weiss is exceptional in a lot of ways. Not, like, everybody is going to be as blind to the reality of things as Weiss clearly is. It happens more than I'd like, though, and it's so dispiriting. I am withdrawing. I am pretty withdrawn, because it just hits me so hard whenever I see someone acting like that. I don't really want to know just how _many_ people there are who'd do the same thing, under those circumstances. And do I blame them personally? Not for the most part. Weiss, yeah, sure, I'll blame her personally. Like I said. She's exceptional. Most people? No, I don't blame them. But it breaks my heart. Every time. I can't bear to see it. Even if that's only, like, one in ten - and I think that's a pretty low estimate, one in ten - it breaks my heart.

I've said this a couple of times, but it's good to be here lately. It's good to just... talk to cis people and know that y'all have my back. That none of you are against us, that if you were, you wouldn't fucking be here, one way or another. I value that a lot. It is easy for me to feel, sometimes, that I'm in a bubble, that I live in a different world from everyone else, that it could all just come crashing in, that we could all just be _gone_, and we would be... like what frogbs said about people who died from COVID.

even now it's like these people are barely even remembered. just people who existed in some sort of "before time"

And, you know. If it's them, it could be us. It could be all of us. That scares me. I hope... I hope that fear is groundless. I still, haha, I still have a little bit of hope left, I guess. Even when I feel like I don't.

if anyone's in or near glasgow there's a protest at 6.30 today in george square. the local nhs board are due to announce a ban on hrt and blockers for trans youth

instagram.com/transprotestglasgow/

gotta say things aren't looking too great over here on terf island rn, and i can't see the situation improving any time soon :(

I feel for you. The utter bleakness is just overwhelming sometimes, particularly when it comes to things in the UK. Not that things in the US are all beer and skittles... people keep saying "2024 is an election year"... I don't know what that's supposed to mean and I don't want to know. I stopped following politics years ago... it's incredibly clear to me that whatever happens isn't up to me... at least in the US _some_ people will support us. I don't feel like I can talk about the reality of it, though, people turn away, they can't look at what's happening to us. I can't blame them. Sometimes I just, you know, feel like our lives are the abyss people avoid staring into...

Right now I can't bring myself to hope for a better world. I don't feel like... I don't feel like I have the _right_. That's just right now, though. How I feel changes a lot.

Ava I'm not going to be able to make it tonight - it was just too last minute for me, I got hit with an unexpected busy spell at work and I have a funeral tomorrow morning so I had to stay late. I'm with you there in spirit though, this is dismal.

i'm sorry for your loss, hope the funeral goes as well as possible, and thanks for your kind words

i have purposely avoided this cass bullshit cos most of my trans pals would seem to rather talk about other stuff (nerdy music chiefly) and i suspect it'd be too predictable and upsetting. like, it's obvious she's a GC plant right? and yet the guardian is rabbitting on about how finally science is prevailing. bullying is the last thing these people have left; you have to have faith these are terminal throes of an embittered older generation surely

i've been avoiding most of the media coverage too, it's deeply depressing and i just can't deal with it. i've been told that the telegraph used the phrase 'evil trans ideology' recently. even for a right wing paper that kinda shocks me. but not too much

and i hope you're right re the older generation thing. hopefully things will be better for us in a couple of decades or so

i understand the need to believe that trans hate will fade away organically but it didn't happen organically in the first place so i see no reason to think it's a demographic issue

the best hope would be a coalition with every other target of the establishment's moral panics over the last several decades the problem is everyone still around is traumatised and demoralised and suspicious of one other to varying degrees and in the worst cases have joined in this time out of fear or desire for leverage or revenge or whatever

if this is a conspiracy to disempower feminist and queer movements from the inside and provide cover for the crimes of cis men they really couldn't have done a better job

if it actually is something like that few participants are actually aware of it which reflects poorly on their understanding of their own history considering how many times gays and/or feminists have allied themselves with the right and been destroyed as a result (even if they felt temporarily empowered at first)

I know most of the people doing this are straight with nominal if any connection to actual feminist movements but I never expected better of those people anyway

the best hope would be a coalition with every other target of the establishment's moral panics over the last several decades the problem is everyone still around is traumatised and demoralised and suspicious of one other to varying degrees and in the worst cases have joined in this time out of fear or desire for leverage or revenge or whatever

right, it's always been a key tool in the colonialist/capitalist playbook - divide the opposition, pit them against each other - it's the guiding principle behind corporate social media. unfortunately it is really effective, at least in the medium term. not only does marginalization and oppression serve to pit oppressed groups against each other, it also causes tremendous conflict within marginalized groups. it's one of the reasons i'm thinking of getting the fuck out of portland. even those of us who have some small amount of financial resources, those resources a drop in the bucket. it's not enough to make meaningful change in even the life of one person, given the forces we're up against. i learned that one the hard way. getting adequate systemic resources and ending systemic oppression will never happen under capitalism, but at the same time we're too isolated and marginalized to overthrow capitalist oppression. by the time capitalism does in fact collapse, what'll be left in its wake are heavily traumatized and marginalized communities constantly at each other's throats. i don't really have any hope for a better future. i'm just trying to have the best present i can.

if this is a conspiracy to disempower feminist and queer movements from the inside and provide cover for the crimes of cis men they really couldn't have done a better job

if it actually is something like that few participants are actually aware of it which reflects poorly on their understanding of their own history considering how many times gays and/or feminists have allied themselves with the right and been destroyed as a result (even if they felt temporarily empowered at first)

I know most of the people doing this are straight with nominal if any connection to actual feminist movements but I never expected better of those people anyway

― Left, Saturday, April 20, 2024 6:53 AM (two hours ago)

lily alexandre's video on the topic actually addresses these points really well imo

i understand the need to believe that trans hate will fade away organically but it didn't happen organically in the first place so i see no reason to think it's a demographic issue

― Bitchin Doutai (Noodle Vague)

well, it's more complicated than that. it _didn't_ happen organically, true. cisgender ideology, however, has been a key component of hegemonic christian colonialism. it systemically eradicated queerness and anything that didn't conform to their ludicrous idea of the gender binary.

the thing to understand is that it _failed_. i grew up in an age where the cisgender agenda had achieved total success. the only way to survive as a trans person was to "pass" - to eradicate one's own transness and spend one's life conforming to their gender norms. if such a hegemonic norm was truly sustainable, then we wouldn't have all of this overt bigotry now. transphobes are fighting a battle they've already won. it doesn't matter how many times they "win" - they cannot truly eradicate transness. trans and queer ancestors fought hard and fiercely against their own erasure for decades, and if people are fighting against us harder today, i truly believe they're fighting for a doomed cause.

because transphobia is based entirely on enforced ignorance. the only way their ideology works is if people believe, like i believed, that there was no other choice, no other option. it's utterly demoralizing that transphobia is entrenched in every single institution of power in the uk, all the media, both major political parties. and it is effective. people listen to the crap that comes out of organs of power more than they listen to their own children. monstrous. absolutely monstrous, this level of cruelty.

they have to _keep doing it_, is the thing. always and for all time. they can never stop. we're everywhere. we walk among them. we're their own children, their own _parents_. it's so much work, and the more of us there are, the harder it is. i know the cost. i know the toll it takes to hate like that, because they taught me to do that to myself. i carried their hatred for them for a long time, and i gave it back. it's theirs now.

and that doesn't _fix_ anything. for trans people it still fucking sucks. they hurt us, we suffer, we die, too often and too soon. and them? ok, they die alone, unloved and unmourned.

the reason we win is that they can just _walk the fuck away_ at any time. i've seen it, again and again. if i could walk away, you know, from all this. if i could walk away from me. i absolutely fucking would. in a heartbeat. if i had any kind of a choice at all i would absolutely not choose this. i can't. this is who i am. this is who we are. my life runs deeper than their hatred, signifies more than their fury.

do i think a better world will come from that? not really, no. the cruel of this world - and there will always be more of them - will find new people to hate and kill. they always do.